Background

Arguably one of Germany’s premier fighters in World War I, the Fokker D.VII quickly became won acceptance by its adoptive aircrews as it began to enter service in the summer of 1918. A well-balanced and stable gun platform, with exceptional maneuverability and reliability, the D.VII demonstrated significant performance improvement over prior Germany types, including its famed older brother, the Fokker Dr.1 triplane.

In order to meet wartime demand, Fokker licensed production of the D.VII to Albatross. Albatross cranked out the D.VII at its Ostdeutsche Albatros Werke (OAW) facility. Multiple models were manufactured, incorporating running changes and three distinct powerplants – two of Mercedes origin and one from BMW.

By war’s end 2,800 D.VII’s rolled off of the production lines.

History

I could not find very much information on this vehicle since it was a one-off field conversion. It was part of the HQ Company of the s.Pz.Jg. Abt. 653 during the battle of Kursk and it appears that this vehicle survived until at least summer of 1944, but I could not confirm that.

The Kit

This is a kit of the Panther D as a Befehlspanzer or command tank from DML’s Cyberhobby line. The kit comes as a smart kit and is loaded as usual with a boat load of extra parts. And correctly for an early D, it does not have Zimmerit coating since this wasn’t applied to tanks until September of 1943. The kit contains the following:

PLAMO MANUAL, No. 801 is the latest in a series of modeling manuals from ModelArt. Previous manuals have addressed, among other topics, planes, cars, ships and airbrushing. The subject of this review is a manual on modeling armor.

The manual comes in a convenient size, 7-1/4” X 10”. It consists of 112 picture- packed pages and is bound in a high gloss paper backing. The pages are also of high gloss paper. The photographs are excellent quality, bright, crisp, and each is very focused on its topic. Thepictures in the articles speak for themselves.

The down side of this publication for me is that 99.5% of it is in Japanese. However, because the manual is so well organized, and the material is presented in such a logical manner it is easy to follow.